How can you not smile at this?

To be honest, I'm still not entirely sure what a Chumby is, or how one would use it. But I am in love with the Chumby puppy.

To see the whole thing, go to chumby.com. Click on the left arrow beside "General Overview"

and you will see "Surprise."




Click on the ham (yeah, I don't know why they chose that), and you can watch the adorable Chumby puppy! Enjoy!

New desk!

I finally got a new desk this weekend. I had a large corner desk for several years, but knew it wouldn't fit in this house, so I left it in Columbus. Since I moved here, my iMac has been sitting on an old desk from my dad's elementary school, while my printer has been on an extra Rubbermaid. The school desk is lovely, but it's way too small for a computer desk. After looking around at several places off and on for months, I decided on a desk from Target. Dave & I put it together today and it looks quite nice. The color also matches well with the headboard on the guest bed which shares the room. The middle drawer is a pull-out keyboard tray that works much better than holding the keyboard on my lap, as I have been doing! I think I will try to find some of those velcro ties to corral the unruly computer cords at the back.

At some point, I may get the printer stand/file cabinet to allow me to move the printer off the desk and have some writing room. Picture from Target's website:


To come later: Royals game photos and Em's upcoming trip to Branson with the 427 Irving girls!

Happy birthday Dave!

Dave's birthday was Saturday. We celebrated with a whole weekend full of food- crab leg buffet @ Harrah's with his grandma Friday night, good sandwiches on great bread at New York Deli Saturday afternoon, and a gut-busting Sunday trifecta of our monthly brunch with the extended family at another casino, a celebratory lunch after our friends' baby's baptism, and a yummy BBQ dinner with Dave's parents at Jack Stack.

Adding to the delicious glut, I baked my first from-scratch cake, using recipes from our America's Test Kitchen cookbook. Dave decided he wanted a chocolate birthday cake with peanut butter frosting. I was pleased at how it turned out- the cake was moist & delicious, and the frosting was fluffy with just the right amount of sweetness. We also drizzled some melted chocolate over the top for good measure. It was quite a good flavor mix!


This weekend Dave will be headed to the annual catfish fry at his grandma's church and watching the acting debut of a friend's son in the world of middle school theatrics. I will likely be consuming more chocolate, as I will be flying to Cincinnati to spend the weekend with 3 of my friends/college housemates. We will probably burn off most of those calories by talking so much and chasing around after energetic toddlers! I am so excited!

Goofy blog mention!

One of the blogs on my Google Reader is Television Without Pity's daily list of the good, the bad, and the ugly of each day's programming. They had a note a few weeks back inviting suggestions for programs to include. One of the reader suggestions last week was Torchwood, a Doctor Who spinoff that we're looking forward to seeing when either we break down and get Netflix, or the nefarious Comcast adds BBC America to its offerings (we can dream!). Our contribution was a little less of a "watch this quality program!" and a little more of a "we swear we are not making this up!"

While Dave and I were watching Friday's finale of "Psych" on USA, we were bombarded with ads for WWE Raw. Now neither of us are wrestling fans, and the minuscule amount I know about it comes from my cousin Chris, who absolutely loves it. But the ads caught our attention for their sheer silliness. After hyping the normal John Cena vs. whomever fight, the announcer promised us a cage match between Vince McMahon, the head of WWE and a very interesting opponent...his "illegitimate midget son Hornswoggle." That's just not even something we could make up, it's so bizarre. We thought it was ridiculous enough to get a mention in the TWOP blog, and it did!

In loving memory of our kitty

Our beloved cat Giselle had to be put to sleep on January 5. We'd noticed that she hadn't been eating as much as usual off and on since Thanksgiving, but she often went through periods of eating less (especially when left at the vet's for boarding or after major changes) then her appetite would perk back up again. I took her into see the vet for a routine checkup, and it turned out she had lost a lot of weight. Giselle, never a fan of any vet, declined to let them take her blood without anesthesia. They took other samples and thought it was just a UTI. I took her back home, doped her up with antibiotics (which she loved!!), and over the weekend she was lethargic and barely ate anything. Back to the vet the following week, where they finally got the blood test and found that she was suffering from end stage renal failure. Our only treatment option would've bought her a few months at best before she declined again, and would've required a stay of at least a week at the vet's, with daily anesthesia so they could give her IV fluids. They usually give cats tube feedings, but they knew that Giselle would never let them do that due to her extremely high anxiety in veterinary procedures. So after much discussion and tears, we decided that the kindest thing to do for Giselle would be to have her put to sleep.

We brought her home for a couple of days, and gave her lots of hugs and cuddling, and all her favorite foods. She snacked on her beloved weed, salmon, tuna, and even ate a little of her normal food.


She actually jogged down the stairs when we put out the weed, which was wonderful to see. It is some consolation that she enjoyed her last few days and is now at peace and free from discomfort. She was a wonderful cat, and we miss her very much. It's very strange to come home and not hear meows welcoming you back (and demanding attention and treats immediately!).

I adopted Giselle (aka Stampey, Gizzard, and Bucky) from Wayside Waifs in the spring of 2004, when she was about 2 years old. She was quite well-traveled, living in Kansas City twice and Ohio, and visiting Toledo and Michigan several times. She earned the nickname "Stampey" because of her habit of running up and down the stairs so frantically and somehow contriving to sound like an elephant rather than a 7-lb. cat. She loved napping, sitting in boxes, curling up with people or fluffy blankets, looking out windows, and batting at fishing toys and ping pong balls.


Stacey once spent a harrowing night in the guest room at my condo, waking up once during the night to find Gizzard staring intently at her from atop the scratching post. She woke a few hours later and found that Giselle was chewing on her hair! It was probably a normal feline attempt to try and groom Stacey, but as I can attest from one of Giselle's subsequent attempts on me, it was quite the disturbing experience!!

Here are some of our favorite photos of Giselle. She had the habit of looking adorable and staring right at you...until the camera came out, at which point she'd totally change positions and refuse to follow any pleas/threats/bribes to look at the camera.

The infamous 'HEY!! Get the hell away from my weed!" picture:

Finding a sunbeam on the condo stairs:


Plotting with Darth Tater:


With Mom & Dad:





Here she is this Christmas, investigating the the dancing robots that Tony sent us.

She looked,

sniffed,
and promptly decided she was having nothing to do with them!


We miss you, dear kitty. Thanks for all the wonderful memories.

A big milestone!

My wonderful car, Henry the Honda, turned 150,000 miles today!

For a belated birthday gift, he will be going to our friendly neighborhood Honda dealership for a brand spanking new exhaust manifold in a few weeks. I got my Civic in fall of 2000 before I left for my internship in Albany, and he has been a very reliable car over the many miles I've driven. What say we aim for 250,000?

An introduction to cookie baking on a massive scale

After a short postponement due to snow and ice, the annual family cookie baking event took place on Saturday. Each year, they make several hundred cookies in two varieties- normal "biscotti" drop cookies, and filled cookies which contain figs, dates, raisins, walnuts, and other stuff. This year we made 3 batches of dough, which required about 27 eggs, 15 lbs. of flour, 9 cups of milk, 3 sticks of butter, 10.5 cups of Crisco, tons of sugar, some baking powder and vanilla. And that's not even for the icing! These recipes have been in the family for several generations, although some tweaking of the recipe has gone on through the years. Dave sent me step-by-step pictures of last year's event, and since this was my first year joining the fray, Jerry & Dave documented it.

The plain drop cookies are pretty simple- you mix the wet ingredients in the pretty commercial-grade KitchenAid mixer:

Blend together the dry ingredients with your hands or a pastry blender. Jerry took care of this part:



Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ingredients:


Mix it all together with your hands:


Put them on a cookie sheet by teaspoons and bake for 12 minutes.



The fig cookies take a little more intense preparation after the dough is made. Roll out the dough:

Cut it into thin strips. (I did not like this part so much because of my difficulty making straight lines.)


Use your fingers to make a thin, goopy line of the fig/date/walnut/orange liqueur mixture. This gets very messy!


Flip half of the dough over the fig mixture. Roll the filled dough into a log and cut into appropriate sizes for crescents or wreaths.



Put on cookie sheet & bake!

Dip the cookies in the icing and add sprinkles. Jeff took care of this step.


Divide the cookies into many, many containers and distribute to friends, co-workers, neighbors, and passers-by.




Above all, keep the dog from eating the product!